Recommendations

Baltimore community as service providers as part of their academic fieldwork, as volunteers in local schools and community projects, as residents, and as shoppers.

The area adjacent to UM contains notable Baltimore attractions, such as the Light Rail and MARC train for public transport, two major league sports stadiums, cultural and retail opportunities in the Hippodrome and the Inner Harbor, and new residential developments in the downtown area. Despite these bright pockets, poverty and crime are serious deterrents to the area’s sustained growth, particularly in Westside and West Baltimore, areas to the west of Martin Luther King, Jr. Boulevard (MLK). The scope of this paper includes the area from the Howard Street Light rail corridor to the University’s neighbors in Poppleton, Hollins Market, and Pigtown/Washington Village.

The recommendations begin with the general need for coordination of efforts across disciplines, followed by the specific health-critical issue areas identified above: (a) safety, (b) green space and recreation, (c) economic and commercial development, (d) residential development, and (e) education.

University Center

A Need for Greater Intercampus Coordination

Accurate assessment of existing community outreach activities by the UM Schools was an important early goal of the President’s Fellows. There are no readily accessible compilations of UM’s community involvement to develop a comprehensive list of activities conducted by each school, a critical starting point to any assessment. Extensive searches of the UM website provided limited and out-of-date information, making it difficult to determine the current status of several programs. Campus community individuals involved in outreach were highly focused on specific project areas, but lacking knowledge of other types of UM-community interactions.

This limited collaboration among various community outreach activities is troubling. It reduces a program’s potential effectiveness from a student recruitment standpoint. This situation also

increases costs and barriers by allowing redundancy and restricting programmatic synergy. Finally, it encourages a top-down approach, which tends to minimize student input.

Goal 1

Either create or designate an existing campus center to serve as the central hub for community engagement and partnership development.

Rationale: Within the entire UM student community there exists a wealth of enthusiasm and developing expertise. This dynamic resource is often channeled into community outreach and service that is school-specific. One designated center on campus provides both community residents and University members with a common point of contact to facilitate engagement.

Tactics: Under the direction of the President’s Office, a center should be named to encourage, facilitate, and support UM’s community engagement efforts and partnerships (Buchanan et. al., 2010). Current contributors to positive student-neighbor relations include Club UMD, the Social Work Community Outreach Service (SWCOS), the UM Office of Community Outreach, and the Office of Interprofessional Service-Learning & Student Initiatives, among various other initiatives, centers, and groups. Creating a new center, selecting an existing one, or merging offices are all paths to be explored for raising a center to meet this broad need. The center would facilitate student educational field placements in the community, serve as a resource for collaborative community research opportunities, and provide a face for relationships between all the UM schools and the neighborhoods.

Goal 2

Develop an interdisciplinary, student-run clinic to provide appropriate level public health services in addition to social and legal services.

Rationale: A student-run clinic would provide community members with free or low-cost public health screenings while also serving as a gateway to existing social work and legal services. All

involved students would benefit not only from further opportunity to practice their growing skill sets but also from working in a collaborative environment.